Publisher's Synopsis
The Many Faces of Ruan Dacheng: Poet, Playwright, Politician in Seventeenth-Century China is the first monograph in English on a controversial Ming dynasty literary figure. It examines and reassesses the life and work of Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646), a poet, dramatist, and politician in the late Ming period. Ruan Dacheng was in his own time a highly regarded poet, but is best known as a dramatist, and his poetry is now largely unknown. He is most notorious as a 'treacherous official' of the Ming-Qing transition, and as a result his literary work-his plays as well as his poetry-has been neglected and undervalued. Hardie argues that Ruan's literary work is of much greater significance in the history of Chinese literature than has generally been recognised since his own time.
